


Trickster

by Kaleidoscope_Carousel



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-04
Updated: 2014-07-04
Packaged: 2018-02-07 09:55:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1894713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kaleidoscope_Carousel/pseuds/Kaleidoscope_Carousel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Roy doesn’t think he’s paranoid. Really, he doesn’t. But he’s pretty sure he’s been tailed on the way home for the past several days now.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Trickster

**Author's Note:**

> Roy-centric although ultimately it is a Nysara story. Brought over from Tumblr because I feel like I should have all my fic together in one place.

Roy doesn’t think he’s paranoid. Really, he doesn’t. But he’s pretty sure he’s been tailed on the way home for the past several days now. Every time he looks around, though, there’s no one there. It’s just this vague creeping sensation between his shoulder blades, like someone is thinking of shoving a dagger there or something. Thea tells him he’s imagining things. Oliver tells him to just keep an eye out. Sara tells him to always be aware of his surroundings. Her girlfriend—the kind of scary one who could probably kill him with her pinky finger (Mirakuru or no)—just stares at him and lifts one side of her mouth in what could be a smile.

He likes Sara, really, but he’s not afraid to admit that Nyssa intimidates him. Plus there’s the fact that it seems like every time he turns around in the Foundry when they’re all there, she’s just standing there, looking at him. She doesn’t say anything, just watches, and when she’s sure he’s become aware of her presence, she silently walks away. It’s kind of creepy, honestly.

He’s absolutely sure he’s being followed when things start to go wrong in his house. It’s not life threatening or anything—not yet, anyway—just vaguely annoying. Like, his favourite hoody goes missing. And yeah, he’s got about three that are almost exactly the same, but this one was the first one he bought, and he has a slight preference for it. Whatever. It kind of makes him upset because he knows he tossed it over the chair in the corner the night before because he knows he wore it on patrol. Inanimate objects don’t just get up and walk away. They just don’t.

The rest of the gang laughs when he tells them.

“Maybe you’ve got a gremlin?” Felicity suggests. Thea just tells him he must have misplaced it somewhere and he’ll find it in a few days, or if he ever bothered to actually clean his room. He tries not to take it personally, but the whole thing is kind of wigging him out. So he goes to Sin.

“Dude, Thea’s probably right, you just misplaced it,” she says, “but in case Felicity’s right and you do have some sort of, like, brownie or gremlin or whatever I think you leave a gift out for it to calm it down or to make it go away or whatever. I read that somewhere.” 

Roy’s not sure whether he’s ready to buy a present for a possibly non-existent trickster spirit yet, so he goes home and does what Thea suggests, he cleans his room. No hoody. What he does find, though, when he takes a break from work, is that every single dairy product in his fridge has mysteriously gone bad. Even the Kraft singles—which he thought were only a couple of molecules away from plastic, and so had a shelf life of approximately forever—have a layer of green fuzz growing on them. And he knows he just bought that milk yesterday. 

When he gets back from the convenience store with a fresh carton of milk and some non-furry cheese, he discovers that in his absence, his sink has flooded and is starting to waterfall down onto the bathroom floor. Someone—or something, Sin and Felicity’s theory is starting to sound less and less crazy—turned the tap on, but the water wasn’t flowing down the drain like it should. When he turns the water off, and unscrews the pipe to see what’s blocking the drain, he discovers sodden red material sticking out of the U-bend. When he pulls at the cloth it just keeps coming and coming, until he’s left sitting on the wet bathroom floor holding his missing hoody. It only gets worse when he discovers whatever or whoever did it also turned the toilet paper roll around the wrong way.

Nobody believes him when he comes into the Foundry the next day to tell them all. 

“Told you, you have a gremlin!” Felicity says, gleefully. Thea just shakes her head. Roy jumps in surprise when he feels a presence beside him and a hand descend on his shoulder. It’s Sara’s scary girlfriend.

“Perhaps you are being haunted by a Jinn,” she says. “You may have angered it by something you have done in the recent past. Try apologising to those you have wronged, and perhaps leave a gift of food or drink to appease it.” Sara is staring at them from across the room, eyes narrowed, and a thoughtful expression on her face. He doesn’t know if the stare is directed at him or Nyssa, and he doesn’t really want to find out, considering how the rest of the week has gone so he extricates himself as carefully he can from Nyssa’s hand and just says, “Thanks, I’ll try that,” before bolting from the basement as fast as he can.

When he comes home to discover that the Jinn, or the person, or whatever has turned practically all his furniture upside down, _and_ spread kitty litter on the kitchen floor— _please let it be unused,_ he thinks, _please let it be unused_ —he decides that he can’t stand any more of this. 

He’s already apologised to Thea for the way he acted while in his Mirakuru rage, so the next person he goes to is Sin. 

“Abercrombie,” she tells him, “we’re cool. You weren’t yourself. I was just worried about you.” He also goes to the rest of the team and makes individual apologies to them as well.

Sara is still giving him a strange sort of look, so he ends up kind of mumbling out something that resembles a “sorry” and “I wasn’t really me” and “forgive me.”

“If it makes you feel any better, I was ready to kill you,” she says, “so I think we’re even.” She pauses before asking, “who gave you the idea for this?” He scratches at the back of his neck.

“Uhhh, well your girlfriend, actually. She said I might be haunted by a Jinn, whatever that is, and apologies could make it stop. I’m willing to believe almost anything at this point, so I figured it couldn’t hurt.” Sara’s eyes narrow some more, and she makes a “huh” sort of sound in the back of her throat, but none of it is aimed at him, so he takes the opportunity to get out of there before the situation gets even more awkward and bizarre.

He didn’t know the names of the police officers he killed, so he can’t apologise to their families. He still struggles to believe that he actually killed people (sometimes he has nightmares about losing control again) so he leaves flowers with the rest of the plants, and stuffed animals, and cards outside the club where it happened, and gets out of there as fast as he can. He picks up a chocolate cake and a bottle of what he hopes is a nice red wine—Felicity would know, he thinks randomly as he’s paying—at the grocery store near his house. He opens the door of his house with trepidation, but everything looks the same, so he sighs in relief and gets busy righting all the furniture. He leaves the cake and the wine on the kitchen table, and crawls into bed fully dressed.

“I didn’t know Jinn liked chocolate cake,” Sara says, as she sits down beside Nyssa on the roof of the abandoned house adjacent to Roy’s. Her blue eyes carry a look of both amusement and resignation. “You have icing on your face, by the way.” Nyssa doesn’t look repentant at all as she wipes at her cheek with the pad of her thumb. The rest of the evidence is sitting beside her, half eaten. 

“It was worth all the effort just to see the look on the boy’s face,” she says, instead of offering an explanation. Sara just looks at her.

“He hurt you, _habibti_ ,” Nyssa says, “I could not let that stand. But I also know that you would be angry at me if I hurt him in return. Although it would have been much more economical, I admit that the planning involved in this venture was quite entertaining.” Sara feels a swell of emotion in her chest that the same woman who had kidnapped her mother and poisoned her sister only a few months ago, now refused to hurt a boy who was barely a friend because she knew Sara wouldn’t like it. 

“What I want to know,” Sara says, instead, swiping a handful of cake, “is how on earth you got an entire hoody into the plumbing?” 

“If I tell you, it will no longer be a secret, will it?” Nyssa says with a smirk. “Now, shall we take this cake and this bottle of wine somewhere more. . .pleasant?” 

“I think,” Sara says, planting a chocolatey kiss on Nyssa’s lips before pulling away again, “that is a very good idea.”

Roy doesn’t have any more trouble with Jinns again after that night.


End file.
